About Me

Tuesday, March 22, 2016

CECEILIA CIA MEEHAN - A GYNECOLOGIST IN AUSCHWITZ

Ceceilia Cia Oropeza Meehan‎ to Remember The Holocaust

Starting from high school as the first in her class, even though she was the only girl and only Jew. She wanted to be a doctor, but her father was reluctant to support her as he didn't want to risk her breaking away from her faith. He finally gave his consent when she swore on a prayer book that she would always remain a true Jew.

Perl married a surgeon and worked as a gynecologist until 1944, when the Nazis deported both her and her husband to Auschwitz, where she was forced to work for Dr. Josef Mengele. Having to work in a hospital with no beds, medicine, bandages or instruments, she frequently had to operate on patients without anesthetics, trying to calm them down by telling them stories and promising a better future.

Expectant women faced a terrible fate in Auschwitz. Mengele wanted to use pregnant women as subjects for his experiments, ordering everyone to reveal any pregnancies to him. Women who were not reported would be eventually and inevitably discovered by the guards, beaten, tortured, and murdered – sometimes by being thrown into the crematorium still alive.

Learning of this, Perl decided to save women from this fate the only way she could. She would go around the barracks at night, giving medical aid to those in need and performing abortions under unsanitary conditions with her bare hands.

In her own words: "I learned that they were all taken to the research block to be used as guinea pigs, and then two lives would be thrown into the crematorium. I decided that never again would there be a pregnant woman in Auschwitz... No one will ever know what it meant to me to destroy those babies, but if I had not done it, both mother and child would have been cruelly murdered." She ended the lives of about 3,000 fetuses in the hope that their mothers might survive, and may be able to bear children.

In January 1945, with the Soviet army moving swiftly across Poland from the east, Perl was transferred to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. When the camp was eventually liberated by British forces, she was in the process of delivering a baby, who became the first child to be born free at the camp.